The Gay Novel and the Gay World
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University of Wollongong Research Online Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts 2018 The aG y Novel and the Gay World Guy R. Davidson University of Wollongong, [email protected] Publication Details Davidson, G. R. "The aG y Novel and the Gay World." Journal of New Zealand Studies .26 (2018): 34-44. Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] The aG y Novel and the Gay World Abstract In a recent review essay, J. Daniel Elam charts the emergence of “gay world literary fiction,” a subgenre of the category “world literature,” which over the last twenty years or so has become both a marketing strategy for publishers and a “disciplinary rallying point of literary criticism and the academic humanities.”1 While Elam’s essay is implicitly underpinned by the usual disciplinary understanding of world literature (fiction from potentially anywhere in the globe, translated into English, and studied comparatively), its focus is narrowed to the “gay world” within the planetary world—a putatively homogenous, transnational gay subculture enabled by digital connectivity and the flows of global capital. This new gay world is, according to Elam, characterized by atomization: “From Sofia to Shanghai, authors of gay fiction describe a collection of scattered and isolated individuals, needy but incurious.” The situation has emerged from the “curious paradox” that “visibility and acceptance” have “made life better” for many gay men “at the cost of community and identity.” “Gay visibility, with its attendant politics of respectability” has occurred at the expense of older subcultural institutions like “the gay bar, the bathhouse, the piano bar, and cruising areas,” rendering the gay community “a banally knowable object rather than the product of a passionately forged experience of self-making. In place of the urgent longings of 20th-century queer literature, one encounters a peculiar form of worldly, muted yearning. So-called gay world literature emerges from a global community that isn’t a community at all.” Keywords novel, gay, world Disciplines Arts and Humanities | Law Publication Details Davidson, G. R. "The aG y Novel and the Gay World." Journal of New Zealand Studies .26 (2018): 34-44. This journal article is available at Research Online: https://ro.uow.edu.au/lhapapers/3672 The Gay Novel and the Gay World GUY DAVIDSON Abstract In a recent review essay, J. Daniel Elam charts the emergence of “gay world literary fiction,” a subgenre of the category “world literature,” which over the last twenty years or so has become both a marketing strategy for publishers and a “disciplinary rallying point of literary criticism and the academic humanities.”1 While Elam’s essay is implicitly underpinned by the usual disciplinary understanding of world literature (fiction from potentially anywhere in the globe, translated into English, and studied comparatively), its focus is narrowed to the “gay world” within the planetary world—a putatively homogenous, transnational gay subculture enabled by digital connectivity and the flows of global capital. This new gay world is, according to Elam, characterized by atomization: “From Sofia to Shanghai, authors of gay fiction describe a collection of scattered and isolated individuals, needy but incurious.” The situation has emerged from the “curious paradox” that “visibility and acceptance” have “made life better” for many gay men “at the cost of community and identity.” “Gay visibility, with its attendant politics of respectability” has occurred at the expense of older subcultural institutions like “the gay bar, the bathhouse, the piano bar, and cruising areas,” rendering the gay community “a banally knowable object rather than the product of a passionately forged experience of self- making. In place of the urgent longings of 20th-century queer literature, one encounters a peculiar form of worldly, muted yearning. So-called gay world literature emerges from a global community that isn’t a community at all.” Elam’s account typifies the stance of contemporary queer studies toward visibility, offhandedly acknowledging the benefits it has brought before hastening to elaborate its pitfalls. During the first flush of queer theory in the 1990s, queer critics tended to associate visibility with social control—as manifesting Foucauldian power/knowledge—and contrasted it with an idealized, untrammeled queer subjectivity. Judith Butler, for instance, in a very influential 1991 essay, subjected the idea of visibility to high-beam deconstruction, arguing that there “can be no transparent or full revelation … offered by ‘lesbian’ or ‘gay,’” and rhetorically asked whether the failure of “gayness” to reveal fixed truth is “to be valued, a site for the production of values, precisely because the term now takes on a life that cannot be, can never be, permanently controlled?”2 For Lee Edelman, in an equally generative text, visibility is situated as an example of “the policial regulation of social identities,” and his own analytic project is contrastively conceived as a work of “resistance” to the “reification” supposedly entailed by open gayness.3 The attitude of 1990s queer studies to visibility is perhaps most astringently summarized in Leo Bersani’s assertion that “visibility is a precondition of surveillance, disciplinary intervention, and, at the limit, gender cleansing…. Once we agreed to be seen, we also agreed to being policed.”4 Elam differs from these drastic pronouncements in that he equates visibility with banality, respectability, and loss of communal identity rather than policing and surveillance, and in this respect no doubt his account reflects the changes in LGBT life that have taken place since the 1990s (increasing social tolerance, the legalisation of gay marriage, and so on). Yet the reflexive oppositional stance is maintained, with contemporary visibility contrasted with a (pre-visible? semi-visible?) community centred on bars and cruising areas. Elam’s chronology is rather vague; and the undoubted, and increasing, impacts of globalisation notwithstanding, his account of an overriding sameness to the world gay subculture “from Sofia to Shanghai” is also surely a too-hasty flattening of cultural and national differences. For Elam, as for many commentators on contemporary globalisation, the advent 34 Journal of New Zealand Studies NS26 (2018), 34-44 https://doi.org/10.26686/jnzs.v0iNS26.4840 of digital communication seems to make the crucial, definitive difference. He contrasts a pre- digital gay world characterised by face-to-face encounters with the supposedly alienated contemporary dispensation. While the pre-digital situation straddles both the before and after of gay liberation, conventionally dated to the 1969 Stonewall Inn riots in New York City, Elam’s piece rhetorically lines up with the not-uncommon queer romanticisation of the pre- liberated past, in which the necessity of hiding homosexuality supposedly generated a subcultural richness and energy that has now been fatally compromised by, or altogether bargained away in the interests of, social tolerance and visibility.5 Though I am sceptical of Elam’s claims, his piece also provocatively opens up key concerns of this essay, which is a preliminary effort to think through the relations between what I tentatively and cautiously call “the gay novel” and “the gay world”—understood both as a cohesive subculture and an instance of global flow—in the mid-century, pre-liberation period that, for Elam, contrasts so sharply with the present day. Specifically, I am interested in how a tradition of the gay novel from Aotearoa New Zealand might be theorised in relation to transnationalism, and what implications this theorisation might have for gay or queer literary studies. In the second half of this essay, I offer, by way of a case study, a brief reading of the 1959 novel A Way of Love by James Courage (1903-63). Courage was born in Christchurch into a wealthy sheep farming family, but lived most of his adult life in London, where he published plays, short stories, poetry, and eight novels. I will propose that Courage’s novel presents an exemplary manifestation of what Elam calls the “urgent longings of 20th-century queer literature,” but also that these urgent longings include the desire for visibility. There is, I suggest, a continuity between twentieth-century subcultural formations and their present-day manifestations that Elam disavows in his opposition between the “passionate” gay underground of years past and the contemporary banality of visibility.6 My relation to the set of interests I’ve outlined is somewhat oblique, but also I hope productive. I am a New Zealander by birth and upbringing but I have lived in Australia for many years and my expertise as a researcher is in gay and lesbian American writing rather than queer literature from New Zealand—or Australia, for that matter. I cannot claim a deep knowledge of the literature that might be classified as gay or queer that comes from New Zealand or that may be tied back to it. However, I am intrigued by questions of tradition and canonicity in relation to gay literature, an intrigue that has been quickened by recent experience in constructing or at least modifying “traditions” for two companion chapters that survey American gay and lesbian literature. If tradition is always “selective,” as Raymond Williams argued in his landmark work of cultural criticism The Long Revolution (1961), what factors of selection are at work in the ongoing scholarly and publishing practices of criticism, anthologization, and canonization of gay literature? Of the two companion chapters I recently researched, one (6000 words) was on American gay and lesbian literature from 1980 to the present and one (8000 words) was on American gay and lesbian literature from 1914 to the present.7 Deeming what is “representative” from the vast wealth of what might be construed as American gay, lesbian and queer literature in such brief entries has concentrated my mind on questions of how texts that constitute a tradition are valued and selected.